It’s a day early for the grab bag post, but it’s my party and I can grab bag if I want to. So, for your perusing pleasure, a few miscellaneous and unrelated items that don’t deserve their own posts.
- It Wasn’t Me:
The film proves it: despite claims to the contrary, I was most certainly not the one firing pizza around on Monday. As an aside, if this modern day Zapruder and its subsequent deconstruction don’t convince you that Jerry Remy’s the best color guy in the game, I have serious concerns about your sense of humor. Serious concerns. Can’t wait for another summer of Remy.
- Browser Feature Request:
If the folks at Mozilla happen to see this, I’d appreciate the addition to Firefox of the following feature: allow me to open a single browser instance without sacrificing my session in the process. Here’s the problem that would solve: like some of you, I tend to keep an extended browsing history open across (too many) tabs in Firefox. When I’m at an airport or hotel, however, and I fire up the browser, each of these tabs generally opens to the wifi provider’s signup (extortion) page. So I have to go into each tab and hit “back” to get back to where I want to be, after I’ve paid the fee (ransom).This is why I always have a second browser installed on my machine: used to be Mozilla Seamonkey, but that was removed when I upgraded to Feisty, so now I have Epiphany around. When I know I’m going to get a signin page, I open Epiphany, pay the service (racket), and get connected. Then I fire up Firefox and restore my sessions. No reason I should have to do that.
- GMAE Debuts:
As Mark and Michael both noted, the GNOME folks are jumping feet first into the mobile and embedded world. I for one am very interested in seeing where they take this, and am hoping to secure an OpenMoko as a replacement for my dying LG CU320 as it becomes available (hopefully fall). I also want to thank Jeff for keeping all of us in #redmonk abreadst of the launch. - Speaking of Thanks:
James Stansell very kindly wrote in a few days ago to thank me as part of International Thank a FOSS Volunteer Day. While I don’t really think I’ve done much to merit that, it was appreciated. More importantly, however, it was an excellent reminder to try and express your appreciation for the work that thousands of developers do to make our lives better every day. I’m not suggesting that you run around randomly hugging people, but you might at least give it some thought. - Atheros Wifi Drivers:
We were asked in #redmonk the other day what our priorities would be for desktop Linux, and my answers centered around power management (read: better suspend/hibernate support) and better driver support. The latter is killing me as I write this: the driver for the atheros chipset based wireless card embedded in this machine is intermittently deciding to disconnect itself once every two or three minutes. It reconnects automatically – most of the time – but is immensely irritating. So if you have a choice between an atheros chipset and, say, an Intel one and you’re running Linux, take it from me: you want the Intel. - Badges?
Is anyone out there skilled with logo work/badge making? I’ve got an idea that I’ve yet to surface with the other monks, but my graphical skills are bad – like finger-painting bad. If you’ve got some experience here, drop me a line – I might have a small project for you. - What Are the Odds?
That someone also staying in tiny Georgetown, ME this past weekend would drive through precisely the same monsoon that I did to reach Boston? Pretty good, apparently. The SOG Family compound is indeed on the east coast of Robinhood Cove, Brandon – we’re right across from the town landing. Nice work on the pic of Reid – I like it better than mine. - EphTown [1]
EphBlog – a blog written by and for Williams alumni and has kindly pointed here on several occasions in the past – notes the creation of EphTown, a sort of social-networking/classifieds/job postings/etc for alumni. It’s interesting not simply because its creator has contributed to both MediaWiki and Nginx (yes, EphTown’s Nginx based), but because of what could be larger implications of social networking services. Everyone knows about the Facebook and MySpace phenomenons, but I’m beginning to wonder if we won’t see the growth of more specialized, niche communities such as EphTown. Certainly this community is compelling to me in a way that Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, and so on are not. Someone get Caroline McCarthy on the horn to explore that question; seems like that’s her beat.
That’s all for now; I’ll see if I can get to another quick identity post that’s lurking in my subconscious, but if not you’ll see that tomorrow.
[1] Eph is short for Ephraim Williams, the founder of my alma mater.
